Interop attendees signaled strong interest in VoIP, virtualization, and WAN optimization technologies, according to a study released today by Network Instruments® and NetQoS® Inc. The on-site survey of 117 network engineers and IT executives found:

When asked which emerging technologies present the greatest monitoring challenges, most respondents (38 percent) identified virtualization, while 24 percent were concerned with Unified Communications, followed by MPLS (14 percent).

More than 50 percent of respondents indicated that their organizations have deployed some virtualization technologies. This will increase to 79 percent within 12 months and 82 percent in two years. More than 41 percent of organizations do not currently run virtualization, and nine percent were not sure what percentage of their organization’s applications, if any, run on virtual machines.

VoIP adoption remains strong with 67 percent of organizations having implemented the technology on their network. Most respondents have implemented Cisco VoIP solutions, followed by Avaya and Microsoft. Looking to future VoIP rollouts, seven percent of organizations expect to implement within 12 months, and an additional three percent will wait more than a year.

42 percent have implemented or plan to implement a WAN optimization technology within 12 months, while 44 percent had no plans to implement.

When asked about topologies, 69 percent were interested in monitoring LAN, 60 percent in WAN, 56 percent in wireless, 48 percent in gigabit, and 23 percent in 10 Gigabit.

“The job of the network professional is becoming more complex, with increasing responsibility for maintaining optimum application performance while dealing with new technologies such as WAN optimization and virtualization,” said Patrick Ancipink, NetQoS director of product marketing. “The organizations that adapt best to the emerging trends and challenges outlined in the survey are those that can understand the before and after impact of change on network and application performance and work well across IT silos for planning and troubleshooting purposes.”

"Many of the people we're speaking with today are talking about network-wide rollouts of new applications like VoIP and unified communications," said Charles Thompson, manager of systems engineering for Network Instruments. "Many IT staffs find it challenging to assess how these applications will impact the performance of other business-critical applications. Without visibility into application traffic and performance, it's impossible to set appropriate performance benchmarks and detect problems before their impacts are felt by the user."